- An American Toyota?
A Swedish WRX?
A Mitsubishi from the States?
What the hell is going on?
Badge engineering, the process where a company
sells a vehicle made by another company as their own,
often changing the name, badges,
and sometimes the mechanical components.
Badge engineering is usually seen as a sly attempt
to make a few extra bucks
(diving board whapping)
(coins clinking) - Ah!
- Or save a suffering brand,
and that's exactly what we're gonna talk about today.
One of the first cases of badge engineering
was surprisingly early in the history of the automobile.
This guy names Charles Nash had a car company called Nash.
It was really successful, but he wanted more,
so he started another company called Ajax,
named for the fearless warrior in Greek mythology.
I mean, he was Zeus's great-grandson,
not a bad guy to name your car after.
Anyway, the Ajax was basically a Nash,
but people didn't like it, and it didn't sell.
The company started an advertising campaign
saying that Ajaxes were literally Nash cars,
but that didn't help either.
So Mr. Nash decided
to shut down the Ajax factory for two days,
and spend that time rebadging all the remaining Ajax cars
with Nash hood ornaments and hubcaps.
Nash even gave away conversion kits for the Ajax
so owners wouldn't have to live with the shame
of owning a car that went under.
So the first rebadge wasn't successful,
but the practice of badge engineering continues to this day.
But why?
Well, a couple of reasons.
The first is cost.
It can cost billions to develop new models,
so companies like GM will take a car from one brand,
put new emblems on it,
and maybe switch up the styling a little bit,
and sell it under another name.
I mention GM specifically,
because they really like doing this,
to varying degrees of success.
As we learned in the Saturn episode,
the Saturn VUE was a rebadged Chevy Equinox,
which was a rebadged Opel Antara.
Most of the development behind the Antara platform
was done in Korea by GM's Daewoo division,
which produced their own Winstorm SUV,
the coolest SUV name ever.
- [Announcer] Winstorm Xtreme.
- Man, that was so (beep) extreme.
- So in GM's case, they were able to design something
that made sense in markets all over the world,
and that's great from a business perspective.
GM only had to develop one platform to make four cars.
It succeeded because small SUVs work pretty much everywhere.
What doesn't work
is adapting one car for a market where it won't.
Back in 2004,
the Pontiac brand was losing a little bit of luster.
They were no longer known
for the sporty nature under which they were founded.
They needed a fast car.
Lucky for them, GM had a fast car in Australia.
Holden had been a subsidiary of GM since 1931,
and one of the most famous models, the Monaro,
was one of the few cars that the company made
that wasn't a badge job.
The Monaro had been in production since 1968,
and amassed a cult following all over the land of Oz.
It has a comparable fan base
to the Camaro or Mustang over here.
It's a legend.
Naturally, people would love it over here, right?
Wrong, because we don't know what the heck a Holden is.
The only Australian things we knew in 2004
were Kylie Minogue and Steve Irwin.
- They kill both of the--
(snake smacking)
Son of a gun!
- Anyway, Pontiac needed a fast car,
and GM thought the Monaro would be the perfect fit,
but what should they call it?
The Monaro name didn't mean anything in the States,
and coming up with something new
might hurt the chances of selling it.
So they dug up a nostalgia-filled name
that hadn't been seen since the '70s,
arguably the most important three letters
in all of Pontiac history, GTO,
and people liked it.
Pontiac sold over 40,000 rebadged Monaros
in a short three-year run,
but it wasn't enough to save the Pontiac brand from folding.
The main critique was that the new GTO wasn't a true GTO.
Sure, it was cool.
It had a V-8.
It had a Pontiac badge, but it wasn't a Pontiac.
There was nothing about it that said GTO,
except the badge they glued on the bumper.
Another reason manufacturers turn to rebadges
is competition at home.
One company might have a gap in their lineup
that their competitor is filling.
Obviously, you can't let that happen,
but as we learned earlier,
it's expensive to develop a whole new car.
I'm not trying to make this about GM,
but they found themselves in this pickle back in the '80s.
General Motors wasn't known for making economical cars,
but now they needed one,
because consumers were rushing to buy gas-friendly commuters
like the Toyota Corolla.
So they went to Toyota and asked,
hey man, can I borrow your Corolla?
It's really good, and we wanna sell it too.
Lucky for GM,
Toyota wanted to start building cars in the States,
so they came to an agreement.
GM and Toyota would share a factory in California,
and GM would get to sell the Corolla Sprinter.
GM couldn't call it the Corolla, obviously,
so starting in 1985, GM's Corolla would be sold as the
- [Announcer] Nova.
- Then, in 1988 it would be called the Geo Prizm.
For 16 years there was essentially a Chevy Corolla.
Toyota and GM's partnership lasted through April, 2010,
when their joint factory had to close.
The Fremont, California facility was bought a month later
by an electric car startup called Tesla,
who used the factory so they could stop making the Roadster,
which coincidentally was just a rebadged Lotus Elise.
Time is a flat circle.
So far, the badge jobs we've looked at
were either okay or mildly successful,
but what about the ones that weren't?
In 1986, BMW unveiled the M3,
a coupe that has pretty much been the gold standard
for sports cars ever since.
Cadillac saw it and was like, we need something like that:
a stylish, dynamic, rear-wheel drive, two-door world-beater.
What they put out was just a beater.
The Cadillac Cimarron was based off the Chevy Cavalier,
which itself was developed
in response to the oil crisis of the '70s.
Both the Cavalier and the Cimarron shared the GM J platform,
which was front-wheel drive
and powered by an anemic transverse-mounted four-cylinder.
To make matters worse,
the rear suspension used a pathetic torsion-beam design.
Any hopes for the Cimarron to compete with the M3 were dead
before it even left the factory floor.
The Cimarron was such a colossal failure
that it almost killed the Cadillac brand.
Auto journalist Dan Neil called it,
everything that was wrong, venal, lazy, and mendacious
about GM in the 1980s.
I had to look up what mendacious means.
When auto writers bust out the thesaurus,
that's when you know they're serious.
The most egregious case of badge engineering, in my opinion,
comes from Aston Martin in 2011.
When I think of Astons,
I imagine unrivaled grace, posture, and Sean Connery.
(car engine roaring) (wild music)
(ejector seat whooshing)
- [Ejected Man] Agh!
- Aston Martin is like the ultimate British car brand.
They're also not great on gas.
This was a problem
when the European Union handed down regulations
that said every manufacturer had to improve the emissions
of their entire fleet.
Aston Martin didn't wanna compromise the performance
of their current lineup or turn to hybrid technology,
so the easiest way to improve their average
was to use someone else's car.
Enter the Toyota IQ, capable of 66 miles per gallon.
It was the perfect candidate to boost Aston's fuel economy.
There was a problem.
The IQ doesn't look anything like an Aston Martin,
so Aston grafted their signature face onto the IQ,
gave it a premium interior,
and boosted the power by 42% to a whopping 98 horsepower.
Oh, and it cost nearly $40,000.
Aston Martin's CEO, Ulrich Bez,
claimed the Cygnet represented the company's commitment
to innovation and integrity,
and satisfied Europe's demands for emissions and space.
Well, I claim (beep).
Come on, you're Aston Martin.
You couldn't think of anything better than a Toyota?
Aston planned on selling 4,000 Cygnets a year
to offset their average emissions.
Looking back on it, that was pretty optimistic.
In its two-year lifespan, Aston Martin sold only 150
of their rebadged Toyotas in the UK.
That's crazy.
I can sell more artisan candles at the flea market
in one weekend.
You know, the hardest part is getting the scent just right.
People are so picky.
The saddest badge engineering story comes from,
you guessed it, General Motors.
The Chevy SS was, by all accounts, the perfect car:
manual transmission, 415 horsepower, and rear-wheel drive.
(engine roaring) (tires sizzling)
It was the coolest Chevy in a long, long time.
It was also from Australia.
It was another Holden, the Commodore, and nobody bought it.
In its four-year run, just under 13,000 of them were sold.
The SS failed for the same reason
the GTO, Cygnet, and even Saturn did.
The brand identity just wasn't there.
The SS was sick, but only to enthusiasts like us, online.
Nobody else cared.
It didn't fit in.
It might have been a Chevy,
but it was made for Australians, not Americans,
and Americans didn't want a Holden.
We look at the lesser-known stories of the car world
every week on Wheelhouse,
so subscribe to Donut Media so you never miss an episode.
I know I missed a ton of rebadged cars.
There's a lot of them.
So let's talk about them in the comments.
There's some good ones.
I wanna hear about it.
Buy a (beep) shirt.
It feeds James.
Follow me on IGN, Nolan J. Sykes,
and follow Donut at Donut Media for more cool stuff.
Wear your seat belt.
I'll see you next time.